Whitney Terrell on How the Federal Highway Project Gutted Kansas City in "The King of Kings County"

(This interview originally appeared in the Westchester Journal News on September 25, 2005)

By Dylan Foley


In his new novel, "The King of Kings County" (Viking, $25), Whitney Terrell chronicles the destruction of his hometown of Kansas City, Mo., by the federal highway project that ripped the city apart in the 1950s and 1960s.

Terrell focuses on Alton Acheson, a would-be real-estate developer who is part visionary, part con man, who sees the new highways and the inevitable suburbs as an opportunity for great riches.

The rise and fall of Alton is told through his son Jack, as Alton throws his lot in with the wealthy and unscrupulous Bowen family, which owns much of Kansas City, and borrows money from the local Mafia chieftain to fund his land speculation. Through shady dealings, Alton helps the Bowens buy large tracts of land in the future suburbs and spurs white flight from Kansas City by selling homes to black people in formerly all-white neighborhoods in the city. By the 1980s, downtown Kansas City is a ghost town, after hundreds of thousands of white residents flee to the bland Kansas suburbs.

Alton is the most compelling character, with his tacky yellow suits, his unrepentant drinking and his larger-than-life persona. "Alton's the one guy who does all the things that are supposedly so bad," says Terrell in a telephone interview from his home in Kansas City. "In writing him, I found him to be an incredibly entertaining character, and I cared about him deeply. Alton says, 'This is the system. This is how it works, and I am going to try to profit from it.' He's trying to trick people, and he is willing to do something dishonest to get a deal done."

Terrell's debut novel, "The Huntsman," a grim interracial romance set in Kansas City, won rave reviews when it appeared in late August 2001. Its fragile traction as a literary novel was wiped out, however, after 9/11. Americans bought primarily nonfiction books in the months after the terrorist attacks.

With his second novel, the 37 year-old Terrell has written a vivid story about grandiose hopes for wealth, conflicts between fathers and sons, the destructive nature of unchecked development and America's unsettled history with race. As William Kennedy did with Albany, Terrell uses Kansas City and its dreams and dark history as a way to dig towards the American soul.

The story for "The King" came from Kansas City's desolate downtown. "My family had been living in the city since 1904," Terrell says. "My grandmother and great-aunts had told me stories about how vibrant Kansas City was in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. I started to think about how did this happen - why was the downtown empty, why was it segregated?"

Terrell started exploring Kansas City's tortured story of race and development. "I started moving backwards," he says. "Why would people move across the state line into Kansas? What were the triggers? The highway went in during the 1950s, right at the time that Brown v. Board of Education was decided. When you link it to the idea that Kansas City had a history of valuing property with the racial makeup of the neighborhood, it made sense that people would expand into an area that had no nonwhite population. I was trying to figure out what was in the developers' mind that said 'We should go to Kansas.' "

The massive federal highway project of the 1950s allowed America's suburbs to explode. People pursued the postwar American dream of home ownership, but the new suburbs also allowed for white flight from the cities. Kansas City is not alone in its empty downtown. Small American cities from Syracuse to Cincinnati had their lively business districts sucked dry by fleeing urban whites and the suburban malls.

What Terrell does so well is to take the story behind a real-estate manipulation that destroys a city and turn it into a moving literary novel. Along the way, he had to take some liberties with history, condensing numerous developers into a fictional family like the Bowens. "There is a difference between Kansas City's history and the book's history," he says. "Whenever you take a change in population of hundreds of thousands of people, you are going to simplify it for a novel.

"Part of the point of the novel was to talk about real-estate development as an expression of pure capitalism, similar to the railroad building of the 19th century," he says. "Pure, unfettered capitalism turns out being something like socialism, because one person ends up with a monopoly. Developers have the power to do things in a city with no restraint. The Bowen company in the novel is an example of a real-estate company dominating a city. They can basically determine where they want people to live. City planning by private interests has been disastrous for American cities."

Terrell sees Alton Acheson as traveling in a proud line of American capitalists. "The history of American capitalism is not about the history of impeccable conduct," he says. "It's a history of swashbucklers. I like that Alton knows his history. He goes back to men like [robber barons] Jay Gould and Tom Durant as source material. Their stories are purely American, outrageous and wonderful. These men themselves put a human face on American capitalism."

In the hands of the Bowen family, preying on white Midwesterners' racial fears becomes a cynical tool. "I think they use race as a way to make money," Terrell says. "It's something to be manipulated, and they are dispassionate about it."

In both his novels, Terrell has made a point of dealing with race. "It's the great American subject that's present in the work of Twain, Melville, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison," he says. "Kansas City is a particularly apt place to write about it. Kansas City is a hypersegregated market. It's different from the South, because race hasn't been such an explicit issue here. It's been under the covers. That's true in such cities - Cleveland, St. Louis and Detroit - that experienced white flight and suburban growth."

As Terrell begins work on his third novel, he plans to set it, too, in Kansas City. He points out that the Midwest is now the crucible for the modern culture wars - the anti-abortion forces are strong in nearby Wichita, Kan., and the new evolution battles are being fought in the Kansas schools.

"Kansas City is the place I know best," Terrell says. "I think the Midwest right now is in a position to uniquely show the effects of our current economic and political policies. Kansas City is in the heart of the red-state area, a Democratic city in the heart of a heavily Republican territory. This is the flashpoint. It's really between blue and red."

Whitney Terrell on Race, Incest and Murder in "The Huntsman"

By Dylan Foley At the beginning of Whitney Terrell's "The Huntsman," a slain white socialite named Clarissa Sayers is pulled out of the Missouri River a few miles outside of Kansas City. Her African-American boyfriend becomes the prime murder suspect. Terrell takes the very unsettling American subjects of race and class, and develops a brooding, beautiful novel about what divides black and white America. "The Huntsman" is a rich, literary work that examines the wounds of racism and questions the meaning of memory and history. "People in Kansas City live stratified lives, where most whites inhabit a world where the African-American population does not intrude," said Terrell in an interview from his Kansas City, Mo., home that is three blocks from Troost Avenue, the de facto racial divider of the city. Terrell's book about race in Kansas City allows the reader to extend this examination to the rest of the United States. "Any particular place can be universal if you know about it well and write about it well," he said. "For me, Kansas City is that place." The central character of "The Huntsman" is Booker Short, an African-American ex-con from Oklahoma farm country who jumps his parole to come to Kansas City, looking for Mercury Chapman, the white officer who commanded his grandfather's unit during World War II. The grandfather had saved Chapman's life in Europe, and Booker holds him to that debt. Chapman sets Booker up as the groundskeeper at a rural hunting club patronized by Kansas City's white elite. Booker soon becomes involved with the wild daughter of Thornton Sayers, a powerful federal judge. Booker comes to Kansas City to find out the truth behind Chapman's involvement in the wartime hanging in France of a black soldier for rape. Terrell takes the reader on a 150-page flashback of Booker's farm life in Oklahoma under the thumbs of his stern grandfather, Chapman's childhood memory of Kansas City and both older men's memories of what really happened during the war. Clarissa initially not victim In Booker's train-hopping escape to Kansas City, Terrell shows hints of Faulkner's "Wild Palms": "The train seemed to voyage not so much through physical counties as through partitions in time. (Booker) woke from dozing to see a man in a red riding jacket, posting through the trees." Terrell switches gears, writing stark images of Booker's interest in Clarissa: "She wore an undershirt and suspenders, like a man, and he could see under the ruststained fabric the precise curve of her breasts." "Booker developed as a necessity of plot," said Terrell. "It was originally Chapman's body that was going to be found in the river. Then I changed it to the girl. I needed a character to break the membranes of the city, to force the white community to deal with the black community. Booker is that instigator. "The "huntsman' in the novel is different people at different times - it is a person coming to make you tell your secrets," Terrell said. "Booker is hunting for the truth over what happened during the war, while Clarissa knows other secrets. They are outsiders, provoking the establishment." Terrell grew up in the wealthy white community of Kansas City. "I went to the private schools, and lived a very privileged life," said Terrell. "I used to hunt with my grandfather in a hunting club outside the city, similar to the one in my book. We would drive down Highway 71, that would take us through the black neighborhood." Terrell's odyssey as a writer took him away from Kansas City, first to college at Princeton, then Paris, New York and Brazil. "When I left Kansas City, I thought it was the most boring place," said Terrell. "I thought I had to have adventures to be a writer." It was at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he worked with the African-American writer James McPherson, that Terrell's attitudes toward Kansas City changed. "James talked a lot about race and class in society and literature," said Terrell. "I realized that everything that I wanted to write about was in Kansas City." After 10 years away, Terrell moved back home in 1996 and now teaches at a local college. "The Huntsman" is set in 1993, when the Missouri River flooded its banks. The river becomes a character in the novel, its surging waters spitting up dead bodies, but at the same time providing a possible means of escape. Terrell draws Booker with full-bodied strokes. The reader watches him evolve in the novel from an earnest and lonely farmboy to a decisive, hard man. "Booker does have some personal bitterness to the white society," said Terrell. Book marketed as mystery Judge Sayers in Terrell's hands becomes a dangerous man, but is hardly a cartoon villain. "Though Sayers does some inhumane things, I was writing from his point of view," said Terrell. "I had to be an advocate of that point of view." For some inexplicable reason, Viking has marketed The Huntsman as a mystery. Though the novel has tinges of both mystery and thriller to it, the book is more concerned with digging into painful issues like race than providing a bloody whodunit to the reader. "My goal was to write about history and memory," said Terrell, "and how the blacks and whites viewed things differently." In the novel, Chapman fondly remembers Eve, a black housekeeper who saved him from indifferent parents: "He remembered her scent's mixture of wet wool and chives cut from the garden, more clearly than he did the details of his own mother." Her grandson Clyde, now a pillar in the black community, remembers Chapman and other whites as using his family. By examining the fractured race relations of Kansas City, Terrell forces readers to look at the painful racial histories of their own hometowns. Terrell's next book is about Kansas City and the municipal corruption that built its freeways. Like William Kennedy and his Albany novels, Terrell hopes to mine the murky depths of Kansas City, despite the publishing industry's unease about books on race. "The issue of race and issues of land have destroyed this city and many American cities," said Terrell. "To write well about this city, you have to write about both blacks and whites. You're going to have to write across racial lines." Originally published in The Denver Post on November 18, 2001